This book project examines global forest monitoring as a means to understand the promises and problems of global visualization for climate management.
This book project examines global forest monitoring as a means to understand the promises and problems of global visualization for climate management.
Specifically, the book focuses on the Global Forest Watch, the most developed and widely available forest-monitoring platform which was created in 1997 by the World Resource Institute. Forest maps are always political as they visualize power relations and form the grid within which forests become commodities. This dislocation of the idea of the forest from its literal roots in the ground has generated problems for forest visualization efforts designed to empower local communities. This book takes a critical humanistic approach to this problem, combining methods from the fields of rhetoric and media studies to suggest solutions to these problems for designers and users of platforms like the Global Forest Watch. To explain why global views of forests can be disempowering, the book relies on biopolitical and rhetorical theories of panopticism and how these views unfold a different violence on different regions of the earth in relation to colonial history. Using this theoretical framework, the book explains the historical process by which forests came to be classified, quantified and mapped on a global scale. Interviews with end-users of global forest visualization platforms reveal if and how these platforms support local action. Lastly, the book provides rhetorical solutions to articulate global and local views of forests without reducing one view to the other. Those solutions involve looking to forests themselves for clues about how to generate more broadly effective and resilient visualizations.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of forest studies, climate change, science communication, visualization studies, environmental communication and environmental conservation.
Chapter OneThe Promises and Problems of Global Forest Visualization
Chapter TwoForest Maps: The Datafication of Forests From a Media Theory
Perspective
Chapter ThreeZooming Into Google Gaia Maps: From Globalization to
Glocalization of Forests
Chapter FourForests as Stories: Storyworld Networks as Alternatives to
Google Gaia
Chapter FiveCase Study: Global Forest Watch
Chapter SixInsights From Developers and Users of GFW
Chapter SevenFrom Green Marbles to Storyworlds
Lynda Olman is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. She is the author of Scientists as Prophets (2013) and the editor of Global Rhetorics of Science (2023), as well as other books on the rhetoric of science. Her current work focuses on improving risk visualizations to support robust decision-making on environmental and climatic issues.
Birgit Schneider is Professor of Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments at the Potsdam University Institute for Arts and Media, Germany. Her current research concentrates on the visual communication of climate since 1800 and a genealogy of climate change visualization between science, aesthetics, and politics.
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